


The Idea of Love

by screamlet



Category: Angels in America - Kushner
Genre: 1980s, Backstory, First Meetings, M/M, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 20:59:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/299991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/screamlet/pseuds/screamlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one will ever hurt me the way Louis did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Idea of Love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chelsey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chelsey/gifts).



> You mentioned in your prompt that you had wanted this for a long time, so I hope it's worth the wait!

I will give Louis this: he was and will be, forever, my worst break up. No one will ever hurt me the way Louis did. 

Now don’t get me wrong -- that doesn’t mean I’ve ultra-dramatically sworn off love forever and no one is going to get through these walls again -- that’s not what I mean at all.

I mean there literally cannot be another human being on this planet as clueless and heartless as Louis; the chances of that human also being male, 18-55 (what? I’m open-minded), living in a major gay-friendly city, who likes drag shows and doesn’t mind the way I turn everything into a song -- oh, and likes cock. That’s important. Anyway, I’d put my money on finding E.T.’s home planet and colonizing the shit out of it in my curtailed lifetime before I find another Louis I’m dumb enough to fall for.

And, of course, I can never be that cranky, open-hearted, and wide-eyed kid again. 

*

I met Louis at my 12th gayniversary. My 12th gay birthday party. The 12th anniversary of my coming out. Whatever you want to call it. Point is: I was 30, I had been out to the entire world including my officially fuck-off estranged family, for twelve years, and like any twelve-year-old, I had seen some _shit_. 

At least, I thought I had. God, what would any of us do if we could see the horrible but inevitable things in the future rushing towards us and our loved ones? Panic? Scream? Look for a way out, find out there was none, lather rinse repeat? Yeah, basically. Notice how productive all of that is, by the way. All the good it would do in diverting an asteroid or -- hey, this is an idea, _curing HIV_? Anyway, about me.

There I was, celebrating being Out and Proud where the straights couldn’t hear us, and Louis was in a corner of the bar. 

To this goddamned mother _fucking_ day, Louis Ironson stands out as the only asshole, possibly in the world, who goes to bars to _talk to people_. No, of course the only point of bars isn’t to go and fuck someone in the bathroom (especially not now, Jesus), but back then --

Just picture it, okay? Me in my too-long hair that always drove my WASP-as-shit parents out of their minds, right, wearing whatever Belize put on me --

(Like I don’t remember: jeans two sizes too tight, black t-shirt because who _doesn’t_ get laid in a black t-shirt, feather boa for a belt, and he even painted my nails because Belize is the greatest.)

Pounding back the third shot some insanely hot guy just bought me while his fingers played with my feathers and belt loops, and all I have to do is stand there and flash my flouride-fortified smile to make him want me, but where’s the fun in that?

No, it’s not fun, _exactly_. I leaned against the bar and there in a corner I saw a guy who was practically about to dive out the window because he was trapped between the window, the wall, and this tall, dark-haired glass of vitriol _yelling_ at him. At a _gay_ bar. On my _gayniversary_. Shit ain’t right.

“‘Scuse me just a second,” I said to whoever was talking to me, and I not-too-drunkenly sashayed over to the kid in the wall and the yelling man, leaning heavily against the back of Yeller’s chair. He felt it, apparently, and slowed down his polemic so he could turn around and glare at me.

He tried really hard to glare, he did, but like I said -- I had seen some shit. I had definitely seen what it looked like when a guy was into me, and I could see every well-articulated thought slip out of his ear without even saying goodbye.

“Your conversation looks _really_ interesting,” I lied. “What are you guys talking about?”

“I was just leaving,” the cornered guy said as he leaped out of his seat and ran off to the other end of the bar.

“Aw, sorry about that,” I told Yeller. “Didn’t mean to make your friend leave.”

“It’s okay, he obviously didn’t really get the nuances of --”

“Gonna stop you there,” I said as I sank into the suddenly available seat. “Are you... _not from America_? Or a place with bar culture? The word _nuance_ doesn’t exist here.”

“In America?” the guy asked as he carefully lifted his eyebrows. “I beg to differ.”

“You _would_.” 

Louis looked down at the floor so I couldn’t see him blush and that’s how we bought and paid for each other -- I told him to shut up and he did. 

Later, I suggested he fuck me in the bathroom, and he did. I recommended he take my number and call me if he wanted to get together or something, and he did (two days later, the eager thing). He kissed me, an honest to God real kiss with a decent amount of tongue outside that shitty bar at closing time, and I was so thankful he wasn’t talking that I totally fell for it. (Look, Mom, I changed someone and they like me! You said it couldn’t be done but I did it! Ha!)

“The fuck was that?” Belize asked as he joined me outside and we both watched Louis walk away. 

Louis, to his credit, turned around at one point and smiled at me; Belize might have smiled back with me, but he definitely slung a possessive arm around my shoulders and nudged my hip with his. 

“No, but seriously, what was that?” Belize repeated.

“Thirty-three, Jewish, sees an analyst, Jewish, can’t have a conversation that doesn’t become an argument, Jewish, and I think he mentioned that he’s Jewish. I can’t be sure. He might have been blowing me at that point.”

“Happy gayniversary to you, _mon petit_ ,” Belize replied, a little impressed.

*

Louis called two days later to ask me out and then, cockily assuming (or just fervently hoping) I’d say yes, he asked about dinner options -- did I have any “dietary requirements” we should take into consideration when picking a place to go.

(He said _we_! Three minutes into our first phone conversation! The manipulative fuck.)

“Dietary requirements?” I asked. “Uh, not condemned by the health department, that’s really my main requirement.”

“Tomorrow’s a Friday -- do you eat fish on Fridays?”

“... _what_?”

“Right, sorry, WASP, Protestant not Catholic, sorry, _obviously_ , I don’t know how I confused the two.”

“... _what_?”

“Never mind! Um. Uh.”

“How about you think --”

“Dinner is really kind of immaterial in the grand scheme -- okay, not immaterial, it’s where we get to know each other, as much as people can get to know each other while stuffing their faces with whatever food-paste has been dug up out of the back room of any restaurant in this city, but dinner isn’t the main thing I want us to do.”

“Same here,” I said. “Eventually, we should probably fuck again, and talk without stuffing our faces full of food or cock.” Louis sputtered on the other end of the line and I added, “You know, just get to know each other in our natural states. We can even put on clothes if that’s more natural for you.”

“You’re making fun of me?”

“That’s a question? People don’t do it _all the time_?”

“Huh,” he said, a little to himself. “Guess not. Meet me at the Strand tomorrow at 7 -- there’s a reading, and then we can go somewhere, grab something to eat. Food-something not each-other-something. I’m pretty sure cannibalism is one of those universal taboos, not to be intolerant or anything.”

“The Strand at 7, cool, see you then,” I said as I hung up with my coolest cool guy aura, a cool that totally chilled out the teenage girl in my stomach who was twirling her phone cord and thinking of how silly/necessary it was to call Belize right then and there.

Really silly, really necessary.

*

After six months, Louis got tired of wearing my socks after he slept over so he shouted, “Maybe we should just move in together!”

“Uh, sure,” I said, more shocked than anything. “But _if_ any one’s moving anywhere, you’re moving in here. Your place is depressing. It’s like you have some kind of vendetta against making your apartment look like your home. Jesus, hang a piece of art or something.”

“I don’t want to lose my security deposit,” he sulked. 

“Oh my God, what kind of art did you want to put up in that abandoned warehouse anyway?” I shrieked. “It’s a murderhouse, isn’t it? Look, my family has owned this apartment for way too long and --”

“You just asked me to move in with you. Isn’t that, I don’t know, something that warrants a discussion or something?” Louis asked.

“ _Everything_ with you warrants a discussion,” I replied. “Just get your stuff and move it over here, keep your other place if you want, I --”

He held my arm for a second and looked at me seriously. 

(All right, that’s redundant because when is Louis _not_ mortally serious about everything?)

“I know you, Prior,” he said, and that was unexpected because Christ, I was 30. What did I know about anything, let alone myself? I knew the facts: hyper-competitive parents that drove themselves into early graves in some kind of gesture that signified their weak/nonexistent hearts, boarding school in the seventies, donating my way into an Ivy League degree because I couldn’t give a shit about anything but pot, and then: New York, New York, baby, and I’d been here ever since. What the fuck did _Louis_ know?

“What do you know, Louis?” I asked him because hey, for once, something in my head was valid enough to make it out into the wide world.

“I know this means something to you, so... tell me what it means.”

“What the fuck? Is that English?”

“Would you just say that you care about me! For once! _Please_? Before I pick up my life and drag it in here --”

“Look, buddy, you don’t _have_ to do anything --”

“I didn’t say I _had_ to, but you don’t even seem excited or -- do you even _want_ me here?”

“If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have asked you to move in,” I said. 

“Okay, my feelings? I feel like... everything you say is just a ploy to get me to stop talking.”

“Can you blame me, though?” I laughed. “You do talk _a lot_.”

“I _talk_ , Prior, that’s a fact of my life. I talk and I talk _a lot_ and you _know that_ , and I don’t think silencing me by just --” 

There. I had frustrated him enough that he was sitting on the edge of my bed, hunched over and digging his fingers into his own hair. 

He was totally right, though, and would be right on that count forever. I hated Louis’s talking. I still hate Louis’s talking. I hate, _hate_ how he thinks if he talks at _anything_ the sheer power of his nasal wheezing and whining will make whatever he’s talking at/about to give way. He prefers this to _doing something_. Even then, six months into what would become the most important romantic relationship of my life, he had to whine about how frustrated he was before sighing and grabbing at his hair to show how fed up he was with me. 

I wanted to tell him, more than anything, that words are shit. Words alone (note the word ALONE) won’t tuck you in at night, come to your school play, march on Washington, change the world. Louis was all talk.

Louis was all talk and was too busy thinking of his next talking point to look over his shoulder at me; if he had looked, he would have seen how my face couldn’t hide how much I adored him -- even if I couldn't say it. 

*

“You don’t even like him,” said Belize.

“Sure I do,” I replied. “I like him lots.”

“You both like cutting each other down. Baby, that’s not healthy.”

I shrugged and said, “We do it affectionately.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yeah, why not?”

“ _I_ think, and this is my modest little opinion, no need to take it into consideration --”

“Of course,” I said with a wave of my non-coffeéd hand to show he should continue.

“But I don’t think you like him. I think you’re playing some kind of fucking game of gay chicken and neither of you will admit that until it’s too late.”

(You know that friend you have who is just Your Friend, Name until one day, something happens and they get a nickname and it perfectly captures everything they are in that one name? That’s Belize. I’d lived in New York my whole life, but when I was 22 and he was perfect, I signed up to be in some charity drag show or whatever. Then this bitch emerges, looking completely put-together and gorgeous on the first day, and announces (as a joke), “Just call me _Belize_ , my darlings.” So let it be written/said, so let it be done, and his old name was off the book of life forever because Belize captures him completely. When I think of Belize -- like, the country -- I imagine _my_ Belize in a suit and smart-looking glasses at the United Nations, looking over the frame critically before he votes on a human rights violation or something. The suit is fabulous, as are all the things he touches.)

I thought about what Belize said and answered, “No way. I do like him. I do. I promise. I do.”

“You think you do,” he said, but he took my hand and held it tight for a second. 

SEE, LOUIS, I wanted to shout. _That_ is how you use language! You spill the harsh, unbearable truth with your mouth and then you take their hand and offer a gentle squeeze of _okay, I get that you have to do this, and I’ll support you_ while your eyes do something totally different, exhibit all this sympathy that I don’t know how to handle.

(Louis always asked why I didn’t just marry Belize -- asked in that childish way that _assumes_ we have the right to do that. Truth is, the spark’s not there, but Louis doesn’t get that. Belize and I love each other and have shown each other in so many ways over the years, but that’s Louis for you: see a network of loving, supportive friendship, assume it’s founded in fucking. Maybe in the fact that we both enjoy fucking men, but that’s about it.)

(All right, there were handjobs one kind-of-drunk night, but it was awful and we laughed too much for anyone to get heady, lip-biting, visceral, can’t-get-enough-of-you sexual pleasure out of it.)

*

I met his family.

He said, clear as a knife tapping on a glass to get the room’s attention, “This is my friend, Prior.”

(It certainly got _my_ attention.)

One day with the Ironsons and I _totally got_ Louis. Here was a family (a pretty big one, I thought, and this was only the local bunch that had gathered together for some matriarch’s birthday) that knew “Lou” was gay. (Those who didn’t know Louis was gay sure as hell knew _I_ was gay. I like to think I broadcast that fact loud enough to be heard and understood by at least the entire solar system.) They knew he was gay and it was okay with them as long as he introduced me, this Adonis he walked in with, as his _friend_.

I stopped going to see the Ironsons with “Lou” once it occurred to me, about a year down the road, to consider what that scene would be like if we had kids. If Louis and I could settle for ten seconds to adopt a child or if the good Lord somehow saddled us with one, and “Lou” brought along Prior and... “Who’s that, Lou?” Great Uncle Shmuel/Aunt Yenta would ask.

I honestly think Louis wouldn’t have the sack to say, “No, this kid isn’t just Prior’s, it’s mine, too. This is my son/daughter, SomethingWhite SomethingJewish Walter-Ironson. He/she is going to be the next president, so watch it.” That would end in no less than four or five pleas of “what are you doing, you’ll kill your poor mother, Lou,” I’m sure. My family’s holidays revolved around making a scene, and that wasn’t the case for the Ironsons.

My point is: if I wanted to make politely awkward small talk with a bunch of repressed assholes, I’d get a job.

*

Year three, we break up for about a month.

It’s not important why. We’d been having the same fight since the night we met and Louis finally left.

I went out with my best bitches and they trash talked Louis for _hours_ , saying I could do better, except for Belize, who laughed in all the right places but had a tight grimace in his face and couldn’t keep his eyes off me. He knew Louis would come back and he knew I’d take Louis back, because he’s Belize and --

And I wanted Louis so much. Not _Louis_ whose feet were always cold, who kept the weirdest shit in my fridge, whose voice grated on me so much sometimes that it seemed like a cheese grater _on my dick_ would have been less painful, but this weird imaginary Louis who kind of existed and kind of didn’t. It’s like in the back of my mind was this moderately handsome guy with dark hair, partially illuminated because we were back in that bar where I had first met him; occasionally I’d get glances of his whole face and a big grin he had just for me, his eyes meeting mine, and like, kismet or some shit striking right there and everything falling into place. I thought I was with _that_ Louis, not cold-foot unsmooth-talker jerk Louis, who kept kosher as faithfully as I attended meetings of the Daughters of the American Revolution (which is to say NOT AT ALL because I AM A MAN _get it_ ). That obnoxious Louis I lived with, well, he was just some guy who popped up sometimes.

All the time.

When Louis did come back and said he missed me, I wondered who, exactly, he missed. What did his mental Prior look and sound like? 

I bet he was boring as hell because I am a fucking _delight_.

*

Every relationship has a rude awakening. I think ours was ruder than most.

*

I wear glasses now and it drives the twentysomethings _nuts_ because I’m like an English professor out of a wet dream -- the kind that always wears scarves and _never_ wants to talk about books.

I don’t trust being comfortable anymore. I was comfortable for four and a half years and --

That doesn’t mean that comfort is a bad thing, but it’s misleading. Maybe Louis knew the whole time that he wasn’t in love with me, but it would have been really fucking _nice_ to mention that to me before I spent four and a half years convinced that living with a man who was a (metaphorical, emotional, non-literal except for special occasions) pain in my ass was the gritty reality of love.

I wish I could have seen that for myself without having to die a couple of times first.

I don’t think it would have stuck, though.

*

Louis and I are friends. That’s the word for people who have seen too much of your horrible side to let them go out into the world and disseminate that information. I see him often enough. 

Now, a couple of years on, he’s like an amputated limb. Sometimes on rainy days, there’s still a phantom pain in the vicinity of my couch or my bed -- there should be feet hanging off the edge of each, political memoirs stacked haphazardly in my apartment where I’ll trip on them _all the time_ , someone to suggest we get take out for dinner so I don’t feel gross for suggesting it.

None of those things are very specific to Louis, though, and acknowledging that?

That seems like progress.


End file.
